A new Pediatrics journal study laments the growing number of Oregon parents who refuse to follow the CDC-recommended childhood vaccine schedule. The percentage of parents who opt out of recommended shots rose from 2.5% to 9.5% between 2006 and 2009.

Government health officials and pediatricians are unhappy when parents don’t follow their dictates. It negates the inflated sense of self-worth and grandiose power with which they have been indoctrinated.

Informed parents are correct in questioning the government’s one-size-fits-all vaccination policy, which has tripled in the past few decades and currently contains 69 doses of 16 vaccines.

Unlike sleepwalking journalists who repeat studies like this verbatim and assume the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics are trustworthy and reliable sources of vaccine policy, I have actually been to 1) An ACIP meeting in Atlanta. 2) A FDA meeting in Washington DC. 3) Several Institute of Medicine and CDC Meetings in Seattle and 4) Various vaccine godfather presentations in NYC.

In my humble opinion, US vaccine policy making and regulation is fundamentally broken. I am a UC Berkeley Haas Business School graduate and veteran of a Wall Street investment bank who studied Organizational Behavior and have observed corporations like Enron and Lehman Brothers go bankrupt after acting unethically.

What I’ve witnessed in CDC vaccine policy-making resembles the worst of what I’ve observed in corporate scandals. The government gets away with it with vaccines, because there is no legitimate oversight or retribution for pseudo-scientific rule-breaking.

Two cases in point:

1) At the February 1999 ACIP meeting I attended, Chairman Modlin voted for and pushed a vaccine recommendation for a rotavirus vaccine that was subsequently withdrawn from the market (for causing life-threatening bowel obstructions) saying: ‘Obviously a situation where we have to make a judgment in the absence of data, and with a vaccine that has not yet been tested in the group …” (ACIP transcript, pages 102-112).

2) At an April 2000 NY/Cornell Medical School lecture on ‘Vaccines in the New Millennium’ by Samual Katz, when I asked what peer-reviewed, published safety study he used when he was ACIP Chairman to recommend at-birth immunization of newborns with hepatitis B vaccine in 1991 he answered: “you are quite right there was no published peer-reviewed study.”

Parents – look deeply into the process from which the vaccine recommendations pushed on you by pediatricians are made – and you will find a cesspool of conflicts of interest and shoddy safety studies. Is it any surprise that more parents are waking up to the pseudo-science behind CDC vaccine recommendations and opting out?